Falling for Mr. Right: Falling for Mr. Wrong, #5

Falling for Mr. Right

(book five of the Falling for Mr. Wrong series)

by Jenny Gardiner

Copyright © 2018 by Jenny Gardiner

Cover art by Kim Killion, The Killion Group, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

All characters in this book are fiction and figments of the author’s imagination. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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Chapter One

Before a major competition , Madison Henderson felt like a boxer prepping for a showdown match, obsessively adhering to prefight rituals so that everything worked in her favor. First she put on her noise-canceling Bose headphones—the ones that cost about as much as a small car—so she could tune out all distractions. She had her phone loaded with super Zen music—the kind you’d hear at a spa or when you got an acupuncture treatment with a lot of rainwater and seabirds and waves crashing on the shoreline and Native American flutes—and she closed her eyes while absorbing the peaceful sounds. Anything to soothe her jangled nerves.

Next she visualized what victory looked like: how she’d win and how the audience would react to her win. And she envisioned the ten thousand dollars warming her pocket, finally giving her the chance to attend pastry school, something she’d wanted to do for years.

She wished she could wrap herself in a satin boxer’s robe and have a trainer massage her shoulders, which she knew would be about as tight as a virgin’s snatch by the time the night was out. Except she didn’t have a trainer, so never mind that luxury. It was true when she got anxious, she scrunched her shoulders up toward her ears and always paid for it the next day with a sore neck and shoulders. Assuming she won tonight, she’d spring for a masseuse with the meager winnings to take care of that problem.

Next came the mindful self-affirmations she went over in her mind:

I am the architect of my life; I built its foundation and I choose its contents.

Today, I am brimming with energy and overflowing with joy.

I am superior to negative thoughts and low actions.

I have been given endless talents, which I begin to utilize today.

I possess the qualities needed to be extremely successful.

Creative energy surges through me and leads me to new and brilliant ideas.

My ability to conquer my challenges is limitless; my potential to succeed is infinite.

I am at peace with all that has happened, is happening, and will happen.

I’m the fucking queen of trivia.

Well, that last one wasn’t necessarily as mindful a thought as the other ones, but she knew it was true, and sometimes a little excessive confidence was in order.

It was a good thing she wasn’t like a baseball player, or she’d swear off shaving her legs or changing her underwear or having sex until she lost a match. And by now, she’d have some serious gorilla legs because she hadn’t lost in a long time. Not to mention dirty underwear. Though thanks, but no thanks—so not her style. Maddie preferred her panties to be the super girlie girl kind and definitely clean. As far as the sex thing, well, the bummer was life had pretty much defaulted into sex-free anyhow, considering the dearth of relationships she’d been mired in for far too long, so that was a moot point. But were it a factor in her life, no way would she put an end to that to win a game. Theoretically, anyhow. After all, she did love to win.

But was trivia night merely a game? Not so much for Maddie. It was her thing, so she had a lot invested in it. And for that reason, yeah, she got super nervous before a match (okay, so nobody else called them matches but her. She recognized that was a little hypercompetitive). She reminded herself regularly that her precompetition jitters were normal—what anyone would experience before a big sparring event.

This all could seem a bit dramatic for someone bracing to compete in her local bar’s trivia night. It wasn’t as if she was prepping to win the Boston Marathon. Or gearing up to take the bar exam, with her future riding on it. Or ready to drill into someone’s brain for delicate neurosurgery. Nevertheless, she was a big believer in being prepared and showing up as the best you you could be.

Besides, she freaking loved to win. Loved it. And dammit she could, too: no one stored more useless trivial knowledge in her brain than she did. Blame it on DNA, maybe. Or perhaps the fault rested at the feet of her first serious relationship, with a boy two years her senior and once the love of her life. The one that got away. Ish. More like the one she’d love to push out a second-story window if she ever saw his miserable rat fink ass again after the way he ditched her without a backward glance.

Ugh, stirring up negative thoughts about that traitor Donovan Reeves did nothing to help settle her anxiety. Maddie was keyed up, jittery, like she’d had three cups of espresso and an IV infusion of heavy-duty steroids. She needed to focus, redirect her mind to the business at hand. Yet now that Donovan had reared his unwelcome self into her psyche, her brain kept straying back to thoughts of him, unbidden—to the times they challenged each other to stupid contests over mindless factoids. The year their high school quiz team won the state championships. The hours they spent poring through Trivial Pursuit cards, throwing down the gauntlet to one another to see who would choke first.

For them, it was all about the challenge, not the knowledge. If you could call it knowledge. Challenge? Who was she kidding? It was more like foreplay: some bizarre libido-enhancing wordplay-foreplay ritual that got them crazy hot and bothered. Or maybe they were already hot and bothered, and they simply liked to play trivia quizzes. But somehow they seemed to do that all the time—the trivia games. Oh, and the sexual games as well.

Sometimes they’d even throw down a trivia challenge to decide who got to do what to the other. Hmmm. Maybe they were just weird. Oddballs, yet perfect for one another. At least that’s what Maddie thought until stupid Donovan up and bailed on her right when he was leaving for college. She’d thought they would continue dating indefinitely. Instead he cut off communication and left town. And abandonment was so not her thing.

It was bad enough having had a mother who’d walked out on her and her brother Carter when they were younger. Now, the only reason Maddie would ever want to see Donovan’s face again would be to slug it (and the rest of him) for betraying her in such a cruel fashion and leaving her heart in tatters. But Donovan hadn’t been back to Verity Beach in forever. She’d heard through the grapevine he was a doctor now, not that she’d asked around. When she learned through the rumor mill that he’d remained somewhere far away, she was glad. Some island in the Pacific, maybe? Or some nation at war. It didn’t matter to her as long as she’d never have to encounter that miserable face of his ever again. Even if he did have a pair of sexy brown eyes that sucked you in and made you all warm and cozy and safe. As if. Make that past tense. At least now she knew what lying eyes those were all along.

She had to completely purge him from her head or thoughts of that would psych her out entirely, and she needed to win tonight. She was determined to crush the competition in the statewide trivia championships, so working—and winning—the local weekly games at pubs in the Verity Beach area to train would keep her sharp and ready for the looming competition for which she’d qualified.

Maddie took a deep breath in through her nose and exhaled through her mouth, releasing built-up tension. She repeated it a few more times. She could do this. She flipped down her car visor, switched on the lighted mirror, then spread on a little more lipstick and one more layer of mascara to highlight her sea glass-green eyes. Pulling off the ponytail holder that had contained a mass of curly dark hair, she gave her head a strong shake, turned off the ignition, and exited the car. As she approached the massive twenty-foot, three-dimensional, hook-legged pirate that stood sentry atop the roof of the Peg Leg, she nodded at the veritable patron saint of this dark, crusty old pub that had been in Verity Beach for as long as she could remember.

She grabbed the (somewhat tasteless) pirate hook door handle and entered the bar. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light inside the low-ceilinged space draped with old fishing nets that she swore still reeked of fish, she recognized her small team already seated at a table near the emcee stand set up in the center of the room. She glanced at the list of team names that had been posted for the night’s competition, noticing the usual suspects: Don’t Know Much About History (she always beat them handily), Just the Facts Ma’am (those guys couldn’t win a competition if their lives depended on it), and finally, her team, Trivia Newton John, high scorers extraordinaire, natch. Then she noticed another group had been added to the list, one she’d not heard of before: Tequila Mockingbird. Huh. She thought she knew all the trivia teams in town. She wondered who’d spearheaded the group.

She greeted her trivia team: Olivia Singletary, who was a hostess at Red Fish Blue Fish, where Maddie’s brother was head chef; Tamara Thompson, who owned a small bed-and-breakfast in town where Maddie worked; and Jesse Montgomery who did some sort of IT work that Maddie didn’t even pretend to understand.

They high-fived each other and Olivia handed Maddie her usual beer—a pint draft of her favorite Shark Bite IPA, which she drank at every trivia night to keep things the same for good measure. Not that she was superstitious, but still.

Hey, so who is this new group I see posted on the board? Maddie said, taking a sip of her beer.

Tamara shrugged. Tequila something or other. I have no idea. Don’t recognize them. She pointed toward a guy in a blue-and-white-ticking button-down and khaki shorts whose back was to them. He was engaged in conversation with what must have been his team.

"Weird. So unexpected to have newbies out of nowhere show